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Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) represent a class of important network models for supporting various critical applications, while the security breach due to eavesdropping attacks has been a critical issue. This study investigates the security issue of MANETs from the perspective of physical layer security (PLS). In particular, by combining PLS techniques [e.g. artificial noise (AN) injection and Secrecy Guard zoNe (SGN)] and the conventional Aloha protocol, the authors first propose an AN‐based Aloha protocol and a SGN‐based Aloha protocol to ensure secure medium access for legitimate transmitters. In the AN‐based Aloha protocol, all potential transmitters are allowed to be active and each active transmitter injects AN into its transmitted signals to confuse eavesdroppers. In the SGN‐based protocol, each potential transmitter has an SGN, a circle centred at itself, and only the potential transmitters whose SGN contains no eavesdroppers are allowed to be active. To understand the security performances of the proposed security‐aware Aloha protocols, the authors then apply tools from Stochastic Geometry to analyse the secrecy transmission capacity (STC) performances of MANETs under both protocols. Finally, the authors provide simulation/numerical results to corroborate the proposed theoretical analysis and also to show the impacts of network parameters on the STC performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents the design analysis and correlation properties of a new spreading code for the incoherent synchronous pulse position modulation‐optical code division multiple access (PPM‐OCDMA) networks. The proposed code called optimised modified prime code (OMPC), which refers to the modified prime codes (MPCs) family. Additionally, this new code designed at a higher code length, optimised code weight and good correlation characteristics to enhance communication security and improve the bit error rate (BER) performance. In this study, the proposed code is used as source code for different kinds of multimedia services such as data, voice, and video. Furthermore, the characteristics and correlation properties of the OMPC in comparison with the other MPCs families that utilised in the PPM‐OCDMA networks are presented. Moreover, for the PPM‐OCDMA networks, the effect of OMPC auto‐ and cross‐correlation properties on the multiple access interference (MAI) was investigated. Consequently, the MAI is considered in the BER analysis and calculations. Finally, the results show that the proposed OMPC is better than the other existing codes with respect to the channel capacity and system performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the dense deployment and wide applications of the Internet of Things in railway systems, the location‐based security access control scheme is becoming increasingly important. In this study, the received signal strength (RSS) and channel state information (CSI) in railway communications are measured by AR9344 network interface card. Then, based on the measurement data, the authors propose trajectory‐based, neural network‐based (NN‐based) and ray tracing‐based (RT‐based) localisation algorithms, serving for location‐based security access control. Specifically, the trajectory‐based algorithm combined with trajectory simulation, movement detection and dynamic time warping algorithms, realises passengers enter/exit pattern detection. The NN‐based algorithm leverages back‐propagation network (BPN) and constructs training sets with measurement‐based RSS and CSI, finishing accurate localisation. Besides, they evaluate the algorithm performance under different layers of BPN. RT‐based localisation algorithm combines measurement data and simulation analysis, leveraging simulated‐based multiple‐input multiple‐output received power and delay spread to realise lightweight localisation. After evaluation, the RT‐based algorithm can achieve the highest accuracy of localisation, up to 99.9% and is designed to be straightforward for integration with commercial access points and deployment to railway communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, secure communications in a two‐way relaying wiretap system with a silent eavesdropper are studied. Under the assumption that the channel state information relating to the eavesdropper is unknown at legitimate nodes, the precoding vectors at the two source nodes are jointly designed to decrease the wiretap capacity at the eavesdropper. The derived relationship between the two precoding vectors is partially similar in nature to the linear minimum mean squared error (MMSE) equaliser. An iterative process is proposed to jointly achieve two precoding vectors, and its convergence is proved. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate that the proposed MMSE‐based precoding algorithm can be used for source nodes with any number of antennas, and outperforms its conventional zero‐forcing‐ and matched‐filter‐based counterparts. Signal leakage from the relay node to the eavesdropper is nearly completely suppressed by the proposed precoding design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Securing wireless communication, being inherently vulnerable to eavesdropping and jamming attacks, becomes more challenging in resource‐constrained networks such as internet‐of‐things. Towards this, physical layer security (PLS) has gained significant attention due to its low complexity. The authors address the issue of random inter‐node distances in secrecy analysis and develop a comprehensive quality‐of‐service (QoS) aware PLS framework for the analysis of both eavesdropping and jamming capabilities of the attacker. The proposed solution covers the spatially stochastic deployment of nodes. The secrecy performance is characterised against both attacks using inter‐node distance‐based probabilistic distribution functions. The model takes into account the practical limits arising out of underlying QoS requirements, which include the maximum distance between legitimate users driven by transmit power and receiver sensitivity. A novel concept of eavesdropping zone is introduced, and the relative impact of jamming power is investigated. Closed‐form expressions for asymptotic secrecy outage probability are derived offering insights into the design of optimal system parameters for desired security level against the attacker's capability of both attacks. The analytical framework, validated by numerical results, establishes that the proposed solution offers a potentially accurate characterisation of the PLS performance and key design perspective from point‐of‐view of both legitimate user and attacker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since the idea of buffers was incorporated in wireless communications, buffer‐aided relaying has become an emerging breakthrough in the world of transmitting and receiving signals. Equipping the relays with buffers adds a new degree of freedom capable of enhancing numerous quality‐of‐service (QoS) metrics including throughput, outage probability, power efficiency and physical‐layer security. The QoS enhancement is achieved by compromising the end‐to‐end delay that is inflicted by storing the packets in the relays' buffers until a suitable source–relay or relay–destination link is selected. In this context, the selection of a relay for transmission/reception is important since it governs the QoS‐delay trade‐off that can be contemplated. In this survey, the authors review and analyse various link selection protocols in buffer‐aided relaying systems. These relaying strategies are categorised and contrasted according to their performance levels, limitations, applications, system model assumptions and complexity. Finally, they discuss current challenges, and highlight future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The achievable secrecy rate regions of various multi‐user channels with Gaussian inputs are well‐known in the literature. To gain more practical insights into the achievable rates, it is more useful to consider channels with inputs from finite constellations, such as M‐ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M‐QAM), M‐ary phaseshift keying (MPSK), M‐ary amplitude phase‐shift keying (M‐APSK) etc. The authors study the achievable secrecy rates with a constrained constellation input for a multiple access wiretap channel with an eavesdropper. They also show that if the constellation points are rotated relatively for the two users then the secrecy sum‐rate can be improved. They perform Monte–Carlo simulations for computing these secrecy rates for classical modulation schemes including BPSK, quadrature phase‐shift keying, M‐QAM, M‐PSK, M‐PAM, and M‐APSK. They also derived an approximate function, whose argument of supremum provides an approximately optimal rotation angle for obtaining a maximum secrecy sum‐rate. they also show, via simulations, that rotation of constellation is helpful for some range of signal‐to‐noise ratio only, which is contrary to the results of multiple access channel without security constraint. Finally, they consider a more realistic scenario, where the channel from transmitters to receivers and eavesdroppers is time‐varying. They consider the case of complex circularly symmetric Gaussian random channel gains and compute the optimal rotation angle, which will maximise the expected value of an upper bound of the secrecy sum‐rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A huge amount of data is generated from the interaction of various sensors and Internet of Things (IoT) enabled devices used in various smart industrial applications. This enormous amount of data requires fast processing, huge storage capacity, secure dissemination, and aggregation to make it resistant from the attackers. Secure data dissemination for IoT‐based applications has been a prominent issue in consideration with the heterogeneity in generated data. Existing secure data dissemination schemes are inadequate to handle secure data distribution. Research communities across the globe are focused on the delivery of the data among the sensor nodes and overlook the difficulty of its secure streaming. Hence, there is a need to validate the performance of secure data distribution schemes for IoT networks using relevant parameters. Motivated from the aforementioned facts, in this study, we perform a comprehensive review on the state‐of‐the‐art techniques, which can verify and validate the performance of data dissemination schemes for IoT networks. We present a solution taxonomy of various verification and validation methods along with their merits and demerits. Finally, recent issues and future directions on verification and validation methods for the secure data distribution in an IoT network is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the distributed fusion estimation problem for multi‐sensor non‐linear networked systems with random access protocol (RAP) and cyber attacks. For each sensor, the RAP is applied to determine which channel can enter the communication networks at each transmission instant. The process of transmitting measurements to a corresponding local estimator (LE) via the wireless network may be attacked by a vicious attacker. Hence, a detector based on cross‐correlation of the causal sequence is proposed in the LE. Moreover, a distributed fusion estimation algorithm based on a sequential covariance intersection fusion technique is designed utilising local estimations calculated by modified unscented Kalman filter. A sufficient condition is obtained to guarantee the boundedness of fusion estimation error. Finally, a numerical simulation is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resilient dynamic event‐triggered control design problem is concerned for frequency stabilisation of multi‐area power systems with renewable energy penetration under transmission delay and denial‐of‐service (DoS) attacks. The main works are presented as followings: (1) A novel state‐space model is established to describe multi‐area power systems with solar and wind generation disturbance under load frequency control and virtual inertia control (LFC‐VIC). (2) The influence of DoS attacks is considered and first modelled by model‐based average dwell time (MDADT). A criterion of preserving desired exponential H∞ performance is obtained about the required lower bound of average dwell time (ADT) of sleep intervals, namely τF>ln⁡λ0/α1 and the tolerable upper bound of ADT of attack intervals, namely τD<−(ln⁡λ1+(α0+α1)dM)/α0. (3) To reduce communication load, a dynamic event‐triggered mechanism (DETM) is proposed and designed jointly with resilient LFC‐VIC scheme by using piecewise Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional method and LMIs technique. (4) To defence DoS attacks actively, based on the resulting MDADT criterion, a dynamic prediction strategy is proposed to compensate the packet drops with unknown bound subjected to attack strategy. Finally, a numerical example for a two‐area power system is carried out to verify the designed resilient LFC‐VIC scheme and the DETM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the importance of cyber‐security for networked control systems, no suitable cryptosystem exists for networked control systems that guarantees stability and has low computational complexity. This study proposes a novel dynamic ElGamal cryptosystem for encrypted control systems. The proposed cryptosystem is a multiplicative homomorphic cryptosystem, and it updates key pairs and ciphertexts by simple updating rules with modulo operations at every sampling period. Furthermore, the authors modify the proposed cryptosystem by using a dynamic encoder and decoder so that the asymptotic stability of the encrypted control systems is guaranteed. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the encrypted controller with the proposed cryptosystem achieves asymptotic stability while randomly updating key pairs and ciphertexts. The feasibility of the proposed encrypted control system is evaluated through regulation control with a positioning table testbed. The processing time of the proposed encrypted control system is on the order of milliseconds, indicating that the system achieves real‐time control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The usage of dedicated short‐range communication, vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) significantly increases the security of stakeholders and improves the efficacy of the intelligent transportation system. It supports multifarious applications to make transportation convenient through routing of the messages. Changing the topological scenario, high acceleration of vehicles and intermittent communication result in the reduction of successful packet transmission and overhead. To overcome such constraints, a new routing protocol for the city environment named ant colony optimisation and intersection‐based routing (ACO–IBR) is proposed. The key objective is to identify the necessity of intersection oriented routing and selection of the route as a task of optimisation. It uses a new metric called intersection rating and a greedy approach to forward a packet through the intersection to minimise the time required to discover the route. The efforts have been made to calculate intersection rating using three parameters such as the distance between vehicles, travel direction and the time taken to reach the intersection. The performance of ACO–IBR is determined by overhead, packet delivery ratio, delay and throughput. The results are compared with the standard protocols such as greedy perimeter stateless routing, intersection‐based routing, AntHocNet and zone routing protocol. On the basis of extensive simulation, experimental results show that the ACO–IBR minimises routing overhead and improves the packet delivery ratio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the challenging issues in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is to provide secure communication as the channel used is wireless. User authentication is a mechanism that is used to provide secure communication. The authors analyse the security of a recent authentication scheme for WSNs and show that it is not resistant to smart card loss, insider, and denial of service attacks besides the user traceability problem. Here, they design an improved user authentication scheme using the chaotic maps for WSNs. The chaotic maps‐based public key cryptosystem helps a scheme to consider a large integer as the secret key rather than a large prime number and makes it fast. They show its formal security analysis using the random oracle model. They also analyse its security informally to show that it is resistant to various known attacks. They show that their scheme offers more security features than the existing schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors analyse the security threats caused by personal wireless local area network (WLAN) sharing, propose schemes under two different conditions, and evaluate the performance of their schemes. WLAN is a widely used low‐cost wireless networking technology. Most personal WLANs use the Wi‐Fi‐protected access II (WPA2)‐personal to ensure robust security. Exposing the passphrase of WLAN is the only way to share it. Passphrase exposure can cause three threats, i.e. eavesdropping, evil twin attack, and resource abuse. This study addresses these threats by proposing two schemes under different device upgrade difficulties. For devices that are difficult to upgrade, their scheme only upgrades wireless routers. All WPA2‐personal certified user devices can address these threats without any changes. For easy‐upgrade and new devices, their scheme uses the attribute‐based key exchange to address threats and provide ease of use, anonymity, and fine‐grained access control. To solve the problem practically, they propose a mutual authentication method based on trust‐on‐first‐use and a convenient attribute assignment method based on the existence of social information. The attribute authority already has numerous social information to provide services and cannot obtain more private information from participants in their scheme. The analysis shows that these proposed schemes are secure and practical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identity‐based cryptography (IBC) is considered as a promising mechanism in the Internet of Things and ad‐hoc networks, providing lightweight authentication and powerful access control. However, it suffers from two inherent problems, i.e. key escrow and the requirement of a secure channel, which are not always good properties in many realistic scenarios. Thus, an efficient key issuing protocol in a distributed setting without the assumption of the secure channel is needed. In this study, the authors give special attention to the IBC standardised in IEEE P1363 and design a multi‐party setup and key issuing protocol for it. Their protocol is proven to be malicious secure by simulation under weaker assumptions. Contrast to prior works that rely on a trusted party for key distribution or the strong assumption of a secure channel, they provide the first practical solution for the distributed architectures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the authors introduce new Montgomery and Edwards form elliptic curves targeted at the 256‐bit security level. To this end, they work with three primes, namely p1:=2506−45, p2:=2510−75 and p3:=2521−1. While p3 has been considered earlier in the literature, p1 and p2 are new. They define a pair of birationally equivalent Montgomery and Edwards form curves over all the three primes. Efficient 64‐bit assembly implementations targeted at Skylake and later generation Intel processors have been made for the shared secret computation phase of the Diffie‐Hellman key agreement protocol for the new Montgomery curves. Curve448 of the Transport Layer Security, Version 1.3 is a Montgomery curve which provides security at the 224‐bit security level. Compared to the best publicly available 64‐bit implementation of Curve448, the new Montgomery curve over p1 leads to a 3–4% slowdown and the new Montgomery curve over p2 leads to a 4.5–5% slowdown; on the other hand, 29 and 30.5 extra bits of security, respectively, are gained. For designers aiming for the 256‐bit security level, the new curves over p1 and p2 provide an acceptable trade‐off between security and efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of aggregate signcryption was first proposed by Selvi. The aggregation process reduces the communication overhead and hence, it is efficient in low‐bandwidth communication networks such as wireless sensor networks and vehicular ad‐hoc network VANET. The goal of this study is to propose a secure provably identity based aggregate signcryption scheme ID‐ASC without pairings over the elliptic curve cryptography. The proposed scheme is provable secure against confidentiality and unforgeability under random oracle model. Moreover, the proposed ID‐ASC reduced the computational complexity when compared to other schemes in literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Letter investigates the impacts of hardware impairments (HIs) and channel estimation errors (CEEs) on the secrecy performance of satellite communication networks with one legitimate user and one eavesdropper. Particularly, the authors derive the closed‐form expression for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) of the considered secrecy satellite communication networks. Besides, in order to research the impact of the HIs and CEEs at high signal‐to‐noise ratios, they obtain the asymptotic expression for the SOP, which gives efficient and fast method to evaluate the effect of the considered system parameters on the secrecy system performance. At last, Monte Carlo computer results are given to verify the effects of HIs and CEEs on the secrecy system performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the distributed load frequency control (DLFC) scheme, the compromised areas by attackers may endanger the stable and reliable operation of the entire power system. A credibility‐based secure DLFC strategy is in this work proposed to sustain the stable operation of the power system under false data injection attacks. In this secure DLFC method, the gradient‐variation‐based credibility metrics are defined to detect potential attacked measurements. Then, the communication isolation decisions are made based on the adaptive thresholds. To compensate the impact of the communication isolation of misbehaving areas, predictions of future measurements by using the average gradient variation of stored healthy data are feeded back to the area controller. Simulation results of a four‐area power system show the proposed secure DLFC can identify and cut off the communication of the misbehaving areas and still maintain the stability of the power system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stream cipher SNOW 3G is the core of the 3G Partnership Project (3GPP) for implementing a confidentiality algorithm and data integrity algorithm. In this study, the authors analyse the initialisation stage based on the chosen IV differential attacks on the reduced‐round SNOW 3G and SNOW 3G⊕. Firstly, they show a distinguisher for 12‐round SNOW 3G and 255 distinguishers for 13‐round SNOW 3G⊕, respectively. Secondly, they use the input differences and the output differences of the S‐box to recover the input of S‐box, which can recover full keys in real‐time for 12‐round SNOW 3G⊕. The data complexity is 36 and the time complexity is small. Finally, they use the impossible differences of the S‐box as a filter to extend the initialisation rounds of the attack to 16‐round SNOW 3G⊕. The data complexity is 28 and the time complexity is O(2115.75). So far, the authors' attack results are the best in terms of chosen IV differential attacks. At the same time, their attack results are superior to multiset collision attacks in terms of data complexity, and their attack method can recover full keys, while multiset collision attacks can only partially recover the internal states in 15‐round SNOW 3G⊕. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poly1305 is a polynomial hash function designed by Bernstein in 2005. Presently, it is part of several major platforms, including the Transport Layer Security protocol. Vectorised implementation of Poly1305 was proposed by Goll and Gueron in 2015. The authors provide some simple algorithmic improvements to the Goll–Gueron vectorisation strategy. Implementation of the modified strategy on modern Intel processors shows marked improvements in speed for short messages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distributed sensors are mainly used environment monitoring systems to monitor volcanic eruption, weather disaster, storm, tornadoes, hurricane, earthquake, and tsunami. The routing path of these networks is frequently affected by the presence of malicious and faulty nodes. The authors propose a secure, load‐balanced routing (SLBR) protocol using wireless sensor networks for disaster management. The proposed protocol consists of a logical clustering technique and an efficient key management system. The improved moth‐flame optimisation algorithm is used to compute the balanced clusters. The leader node is computed by the rank values with a tool of adaptive network‐based fuzzy inference system. Then, the hybrid signcryption algorithm‐based key management system for secure data transmission between the source node and destination node. The experimental result shows that the proposed SLBR protocol improves the security and balances the load compared to existing protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless sensor network (WSN) plays a predominant role from household equipment into military applications,sometimes utilised to handle most sensitive, personalised data like body sensors report, medical purposes in those cases, all kind of prescription and decisions are taken based on the sensor data. Many algorithms and techniques have been developed for these purposes among them trust‐based algorithms outperform the conventional techniques. A trust method provides ultimate security with integrity, authenticity and availability of data to all the nodes. Data overhead is the complication encountered while implementation trust‐based method which leads to complications like congestion into the system. And also directly affects the data aggregation process, as a cumulative effect, the overall lifetime of the network is drastically brought down. This study proposes a realisable secure aware routing (RSAR) protocol: RSAR method to overcome the said issue. The RSAR starts with the trust factor calculation of individual sensor node. Then the values are computed by optimal trust inference model using the conditional tug of war optimisation algorithm. The data aggregation help in reducing the instantaneous data flow of the individual node to multi‐hop and filters out the necessary data alone, then transmits the accumulated information to the receiving end. The energy efficiency of this proposed work is achieved through bypassing the repeated and fault data from the gathered information and in turn, it will maximise the WSN lifetime by saving its battery. Trust factor calculations introduced by this method help in identifying the attacks and mitigate by calculating the trust factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies have shown that existing elliptic curve‐based cryptographic standards provide backdoors for manipulation and hence compromise the security. In this regard, two new elliptic curves known as Curve448 and Curve25519 are recently recommended by IETF for transport layer security future generations. Hence, cryptosystems built over these elliptic curves are expected to play a vital role in the near future for secure communications. A high‐speed elliptic curve cryptographic processor (ECCP) for the Curve448 is proposed in this study. The area of the ECCP is optimised by performing different modular operations required for the elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman protocol through a unified architecture. The critical path delay of the proposed ECCP is optimised by adopting the redundant‐signed‐digit technique for arithmetic operations. The segmentation approach is introduced to reduce the required number of clock cycles for the ECCP. The proposed ECCP is developed using look‐up‐tables (LUTs) only, and hence it can be ported to any field‐programmable gate array family or standard ASIC libraries. The authors' ECCP design offers higher speed without any significant area overhead to recent designs reported in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Physical unclonable function (PUF) is hardware‐specific security primitive for providing cryptographic functionalities that are applicable for secure communication among the embedded devices. The physical structure of PUF is considered to be easy to manufacture but hard or impossible to replicate due to variations in its manufacturing process. However, a large community of analytics believes hardware‐based PUF has paved the way for its realisation in providing dependable security. In this study, the authors have thoroughly explored the architecture, applications, requirements, and challenges of PUF that provide security solutions. For presenting the literature, they have designed a taxonomy where PUFs are divided under two main categories, including non‐silicon and silicon‐based PUF. Currently, there is no comprehensive survey that highlights the comparison and usability of memory‐based and analogue/mixed‐signal based PUF that are considered to be suitable as compared to counterparts. In a similar vein, they have presented the network‐specific application scenarios in wireless sensor network, wireless body area network and Internet of Things and then identified the strong, weak and controlled PUF in a categorical manner. Moreover, they have presented a number of prospective limitations that are identified in PUF structures and then identified the open research challenges to meet the desired security levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart grids represent the latest trend that has disrupted the energy supplier sector. They are in the form of smart meters that automatically communicate power consumption data to the power grid operator. In fact, the smart‐grid technology is a great solution for energy suppliers and their end customers, enabling them to perform more frequent measurements of energy, monitor their consumption and thus control the amount of their energy bills. Although the smart‐grid technology brings significant gains in performance and economy to its users. However, this advanced technology immediately raises different types of attacks that can adversely affect the operation of smart grids by falsifying electricity consumption data transmitted between smart meters and the power distribution server and therefore through the generation of incorrect energy billing invoices. The reflection carried out in the proposed approach is part of this problem. It is particularly concerned with realising a new privacy‐protected authenticated key agreement scheme for secure communication between smart meters and energy providers. The conducted experiments show that the proposed authentication scheme exceeds its competitors in terms of calculation costs and resistance to various types of attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multi-input multi-output (MIMO) transmission against a smart attacker has recently been formulated as a non-collaborative game, in which the reinforcement learning-based transmitter is devised to suppress the attack motivation of the malicious attacker for more secure transmission. Basically, large enough transmission power is needed to obtain the Nash equilibrium in favour of the MIMO transmitter. When energy efficiency is required, a secure MIMO transmission design with reasonable energy efficiency will become highly desirable. This study focuses on how to make the MIMO transmitter not only resist malicious attacker but also realise reasonable energy efficiency. To this end, a new game between the MIMO transmitter and the malicious attacker is formulated to take into account the energy efficiency of the MIMO transmitter. Since the energy efficiency requirement tends to reduce the transmission power by the MIMO transmitter, which may degrade the realised security performance in an adverse environment, the probabilistic transmission strategy was employed to further enhance the secure transmission. The analysis results unveil that the proposed energy-efficient secure MIMO transmission design can not only ensure reasonable security performance but also noticeably improve energy efficiency performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By means of advanced information and communication technology, cyber‐physical power systems can attain real‐time monitor and control but have to suffer the damage caused by a cyber attack. In this study, the authors' define attack efficiency to evaluate attack paths that attacker may adopt to intrude systems, to find the most efficient attack paths (i.e. the most vulnerable paths). Based on the actual power grid and security stability control system, the coupling model of cyber‐physical power systems is established to analyse the propagation of cascading failure within and across the physical power grid and communication network. In the attack model, the attack cost matrix is built to describe the cost between directly connected nodes in a communication network. Furthermore, considering the probability that control commands are successfully transmitted from router nodes to generator/substation nodes, the total attack cost from the communication network to the physical power grid is figured out. To search for the most vulnerable attack paths in systems, the attack efficiency is proposed to quantify the relation between attack cost and attack gain, wherein the attack gain is the damage on systems caused by the cyber attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing penetrations of interoperable distributed energy resources (DER) in the electric power system are expanding the power system attack surface. Maloperation or malicious control of DER equipment can now cause substantial disturbances to grid operations. Fortunately, many options exist to defend and limit adversary impact on these newly-created DER communication networks, which typically traverse the public internet. However, implementing these security features will increase communication latency, thereby adversely impacting real-time DER grid support service effectiveness. In this work, a collection of software tools called SCEPTRE was used to create a co-simulation environment where SunSpec-compliant photovoltaic inverters were deployed as virtual machines and interconnected to simulated communication network equipment. Network segmentation, encryption, and moving target defence security features were deployed on the control network to evaluate their influence on cybersecurity metrics and power system performance. The results indicated that adding these security features did not impact DER-based grid control systems but improved the cybersecurity posture of the network when implemented appropriately.

This study presents a hybrid data-driven physics model-based framework for real-time monitoring in smart grids. As the power grid transitions to the use of smart grid technology, it's real-time monitoring becomes more vulnerable to cyber-attacks like false data injections (FDIs). Although smart grids cyber-physical security has an extensive scope, this study focuses on FDI attacks, which are modelled as bad data. State-of-the-art strategies for FDI detection in real-time monitoring rely on physics model-based weighted least-squares state estimation solution and statistical tests. This strategy is inherently vulnerable by the linear approximation and the companion statistical modelling error, which means it can be exploited by a coordinated FDI attack. In order to enhance the robustness of FDI detection, this study presents a framework which explores the use of data-driven anomaly detection methods in conjunction with physics model-based bad data detection via data fusion. Multiple anomaly detection methods working at both the system level and distributed local detection level are fused. The fusion takes into consideration the confidence of the various anomaly detection methods to provide the best overall detection results. Validation considers tests on the IEEE 118-bus system.

Strong adaptive radar, such as cognitive radar (CNR), can perform various missions while ensuring its own security in electronic warfare, via detecting environments and changing the radar parameters in real time. Unfortunately, most of the current military countermeasures, such as jamming-based electronic countermeasures, have rarely been related to jamming for CNR. Since the behaviours of radar in the traditional design of the jammer-radar scenario are always static, it is easy to create a subjective or local optimal jamming effect. In order to dynamically analyse the execution process of a complete jamming radar mission, this work establishes an equivalent attack-defence game in which the radar is regarded as a defence decision agent, and the jammer is an attack decision agent. The attributes of the game's players, the rules of the game, and the conditions for the end of the game are set clearly by setting reasonable parameters. After searching for antagonism strategies by exhaustive method, it can be found that the survivability of the predictive cognitive jamming is much stronger than that of the normal jamming based on real-time sampling data of radars. This conclusion is demonstrated through a 1 ms simulation of the game process.

In well-managed coordinated networked microgrids (MGs) besides electricity interchange between MGs, global optimisation is fulfilled. Here the authors studied a networked MG architecture, in which the control centre of microgrids communicates with a distribution network operator (DNO) to fulfil their local requirements. However, communication signals are always vulnerable to cyberattacks. While the surplus/deficit powers are reported by one MG to DNO, other MGs can act as potential cyber attackers aimed at decreasing their own costs. This action may also lead to threat the global optimisation of networked MGs. When an attacker manipulates the signal sent from the attacked MG to DNO, it will result in a false power interchange schedule produced by DNO. The attacker MG in the next step, maliciously accesses and changes the signal sent from the DNO to the attacked MG. In case a successful attack executed, the operation cost of the attacker MG will be decreased. Furthermore, a game-theoretic model of attacker–defender interaction is proposed, while different behaviours of players are addressed. The optimal scheduling scheme of MGs is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming problem and solved by CPLEX. Simulation results show the impacts of the attacks and importance of the defend strategies.

Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing and wireless medical sensor networks have significantly improved remote healthcare monitoring. In a healthcare monitoring system, many resource-limited sensors are deployed to sense, process and communicate the information. However, continuous and accurate operations of these devices are very important, especially in the infant incubator monitoring system. Because important decisions are made on the received information. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure the authenticity between the incubator monitoring system and doctors. In this work, a public key encryption based computationally efficient mutual authentication protocol is proposed for secure data transmission between incubator monitoring systems and doctors or administrators. The proposed protocol improves performance and reduces the computational cost without compromising the security. The security analysis part shows the strength of the proposed protocol against various attacks, performance analysis part shows that the proposed protocol performs better than other existing protocol based on Rivest–Shamir–Adleman and elliptic-curve cryptography schemes.

Wireless sensor networks consist of a collection of sensors to monitor physical or environmental events. Nowadays, the sensor networks are used in important applications like military, health and civilian monitoring. Since it is a wireless medium, deployed in remote locations and resource-constrained nature, the sensor networks are easily vulnerable to attacks. The attack creates significant damages to the sensor networks. To avoid these problems, intrusion detection system (IDS) is implemented at the base station to filter any abnormal packets. In the proposed system, a survey is made on the attacks and rules to detect the attacks. Filtering the attacks using rule-based IDS at the sensor nodes would reduce the amount of packet transmission to the base station which, in turn, would reduce the energy consumption of the sensor network. Extreme learning machine (ELM) algorithm is implemented at the base station to detect the abnormal packets. The experimental result shows the performance of different classification techniques and cross-layer rules over the NSL-KDD and real-time datasets. The detection rate of the ELM algorithm is higher compared to other systems.

The messages in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) are vulnerable to attack in the open wireless environment. Group communication in VANET is receiving more attention, which confronts many security issues. First, only users who have passed legal authentication can communicate in the group. The ring signature is an effective solution. In addition, the group membership in the vehicular self-organising network changes rapidly, which leads to dynamic adjustment of group members. It is necessary to consider the computing power and communication capability of each node in the group members. To speed up the authentication process, a roadside unit with more computing power and communication capability than vehicles is selected as the signature agent, which effectively reduces the computational load of vehicles and accelerates the communication throughput. Meanwhile, the computational task and communication overhead have not been well-solved. To address these issues, this paper proposed an efficient proxy ring signature scheme for VANET to achieve higher signature efficiency and lower transmission overhead. The scheme allows both privacy protection and original signer tracing. Security analysis shows that the proposed scheme meets the security requirements of VANET.

Cybersecurity has become a major concern in the modern world. A serious threat to wireless networks is eavesdropping. On the other hand, usable spectrum is diminishing due to the presence of various wireless services. To address the problem, highly spectral efficient methods have been introduced e.g. spectrum sharing. Cognitive radio networks could sense unused spectrum and make use of it. In this paper, the cognitive radio is to perform a second task, i.e. jamming the eavesdropper. This paper is significant in revealing the cognitive radio's energy efficiency in this setting, where a cognitive transmitter (CT) can transmit its own data when it senses the absence of primary transmitter (PT). If PT is present, CT is to jam an eavesdropper (EA) by transmitting artificial noise. Our main contribution is finding the CT's optimal energy efficiency. Through the proposed formulas, we have determined the fractions of time and power required by CT to achieve the optimal energy efficiency, subject to constraints like minimum required secrecy rate Rs, etc. Our major findings are: (1) only a small portion of a time frame (66 μs in our setting) is required for sensing. CT can utilize the remaining time for sending its data or jamming EA. (2) To achieve a target energy efficiency of 0.5 bps/Hz/J, PT should not be actively transmitting more than 35% of the time, and Rs should not be larger than 1.2 bps/Hz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors investigate secure resource allocation for an orthogonal frequency division multiple access two‐way relay network, which has several pairs of mobile users (MUs) and one energy harvesting (EH) relay. In this network, the relay is untrusted and each MU pair may also overhear the other MU pairs' confidential information. In particular, to forward information for each MU, the relay adopts power splitting technique to harvest energy from radio frequency signals emitted by each MU. For this scenario, which has hardly been considered, the joint problem of subcarrier allocation, power control, and power splitting ratio selection is formulated, with the aim to maximise the total secrecy rate of all MUs. A suboptimal algorithm with low complexity and satisfactory performance is proposed to solve the formulated non‐convex problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses issues and developments in communications security among governments, particularly the effectiveness of their signals intelligence (SIGINT) services in gathering communications information while protecting their own. Other topics include the reasons behind the overconfidence of military organizations and intelligence services on the security of their communications, as well as a brief history on the lack of concern by many states on their communications security.

This paper aims to present the details regarding telecommunication network security through cryptology protocols. The data was based on scientific data collection and the quantitative method was adopted. The questionnaire was developed and the primary respondents were approached who were working in 4 telecommunication networking companies namely Huawei, Ericsson, SK Telecom and Telefonica. The sample size of the research was 60 participants and the statistical analysis was used to analyze research. The finding shows that cryptology protocol such as SSH, SSL, Kerberos PGP and SET are implemented within the companies in order to secure network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the first time, two pieces of EU legislation will specifically target smartphone ecosystems in relation to smartphone and mobile software (eg, iOS and Android) privacy, and use and monetisation of data. And yet, both pieces of legislation approach data use and data monetisation from radically contrasting perspectives. The first is the proposed ePrivacy Regulation, which seeks to provide enhanced protection against user data monitoring and tracking in smartphones, and safeguard privacy in electronic communications. On the other hand, the recently enacted Platform-to-Business Regulation 2019, seeks to bring fairness to platform-business user relations (including app stores and app developers), and is crucially built upon the premise that the ability to access and use data, including personal data, can enable important value creation in the online platform economy. This article discusses how these two Regulations will apply to smartphone ecosystems, especially relating to user and device privacy. The article analyses the potential tension points between the two sets of rules, which result from the underlying policy objectives of safeguarding privacy in electronic communications and the functioning of the digital economy in the emerging era of platform governance. The article concludes with a discussion on how to address these issues, at the intersection of privacy and competition in the digital platform economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strong adaptive radar, such as cognitive radar (CNR), can perform various missions while ensuring its own security in electronic warfare, via detecting environments and changing the radar parameters in real time. Unfortunately, most of the current military countermeasures, such as jamming-based electronic countermeasures, have rarely been related to jamming for CNR. Since the behaviours of radar in the traditional design of the jammer-radar scenario are always static, it is easy to create a subjective or local optimal jamming effect. In order to dynamically analyse the execution process of a complete jamming radar mission, this work establishes an equivalent attack-defence game in which the radar is regarded as a defence decision agent, and the jammer is an attack decision agent. The attributes of the game's players, the rules of the game, and the conditions for the end of the game are set clearly by setting reasonable parameters. After searching for antagonism strategies by exhaustive method, it can be found that the survivability of the predictive cognitive jamming is much stronger than that of the normal jamming based on real-time sampling data of radars. This conclusion is demonstrated through a 1 ms simulation of the game process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National security policy in cyberspace presents a unique security challenge. Operations under the current mandate of the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) may incidentally capture Canadian information and thereby affect Canadian privacy interests. This raises serious concerns that this regime does not comply with sections 8 and 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, legislative reform under Bill C-59 implements external accountability measures in a manner that satisfies Charter requirements. Finally, Bill C-59 makes significant changes to CSE's mandate, namely the addition of an "active" cyber mandate. These changes raise concerns that the expansion of CSE's offensive capabilities, without careful oversight, may enable CSE to conduct cyber operations that do not comply with Canada's international legal obligations and are not authorized by Parliament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the important considerations in a sensor network is energy consumption. Cluster‐based routing protocols are often proposed to reduce energy consumption. However, clusters are vulnerable due to malicious nodes. Malicious nodes inject fake messages to cluster‐header, which increases communication overhead and energy consumption. Secure cluster‐based routing is one of the most required solutions to consume more energy during data transmission. In this study, the authors propose a secure cluster‐based routing protocol (SCBRP) that uses adaptive particle swarm optimisation (PSO) with optimised firefly algorithms during data transmission in a wireless sensor network. The objective of this study is to minimise energy consumption over an individual node to improve the whole network lifetime. The proposed SCBRP is based on the hexagonal sensor network architecture, and it is designed by three processes to include energy‐efficient clustering, secure routing, and security verification. The performance of the proposed SCBRP is evaluated using NS‐3, and it is estimated by different metrics such as encryption time, decryption time, energy consumption, packet drop rate, and network lifetime. The simulation results are compared with the previous approaches and finally, the authors' proposed SCBRP is proved that it obtained better performance than previous approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major objective of vehicular networking is to improve road safety and travel convenience. The experience of individual vehicles on traffic conditions and travel situations can be shared with other vehicles for improving their route planning and driving decisions. Nevertheless, the frequent occurrence of adversary vehicles in the network is unavoidable. These vehicles may engage in various malicious activities affecting the overall network performance. To control and monitor effectively security threats in vehicular networks, an efficient trust management system should be employed to identify the trustworthiness of individual vehicles and detect malicious drivers. This study provides a review of the research efforts aimed at enabling trust in vehicular environments. The major challenges are highlighted, and an edge‐based architecture is proposed as a supportive platform. Furthermore, existing models proposed for trust evaluation, aggregation, propagation and decision making are reviewed. Finally, the current directions to enforce trust in vehicular environments are highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]